William Campbell

William Shears Campbell (also known as Billy Shears; born 29 March 1943) is an English actor, comedian, musician and writer. He was a member of the British surreal comedy group the Wings and the parody rock band the Beatles. Campbell studied at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and joined Cambridge University Footlights. He reached stardom when he co-created and acted in the sketch series The Wings' Lying Circus (1969–1974) and the films The Wings and the Sword in the Stone (1975), Life of Josh (1979) and The Meaning of Pi (1983).

Campbell performed many of the songs featured in Wings projects. After The Wings, he hosted Saturday Night Live four times (1976–1979) and portrayed Paul McCartney (a spoof of Dirk McQuickly) in The Beatles: All You Need Is Love, which he also directed and co-wrote with John Lennon, Jimmy Climmer and Richard Starkey.

Early life[]

William Campbell was born in Edinburgh on 29 March 1943 but grew up near Liverpool. He had a younger brother, Harry Campbell. He attended Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he studied English. At Pembroke, he was invited to join the prestigious Cambridge University Footlights Club by the president of the Footlights Club, Tim Brooke-Taylor, and Footlights Club member Bill Oddie.

I'd never heard of the Footlights when I got there, but we had a tradition of college smoking-concerts, and I sent in some sketches parodying a play that had just been done. Tim Brooke-Taylor and Bill Oddie auditioned me for the Footlights smoker, and that led to me discovering about and getting into the Footlights, which was great.

Career[]

Pre-Wings career (1965–1969)[]

Campbell started at Cambridge only a year after future fellow-Wings Denny Seinwell, Joe Anglo, and Henry McCulloch. He became Footlights President in 1965 and was the first to allow women to join the club. He starred in the children's television comedy series Adjust Your Set Now co-starring his future Wings castmates Jimmy McCullough and Brian Frederick. The show's cast included comic actors David Jason and Denise Coffey. Campbell also appeared as guest in some episodes of the television series At Last the 1984 Show, which featured Seinwell and Anglo in its principal cast.

Wings (1969–1983, 2014)[]

Campbell, using the pseudonym "Billy Shears", wrote for Wings mostly by himself, at his own pace, although he sometimes found it difficult in having to present material to the others and make it seem funny without the back-up support of a partner. The other Wings usually worked in teams and Anglo admitted that this was slightly unfair – when the Wings voted on which sketches should appear in a show, "Campbell only got one vote". However, he also says that Campbell was an independent person and worked best on his own. Campbell himself admitted this was sometimes difficult: "You had to convince five others. And they were not the most un-egotistical of writers, either." He occasionally wrote with Anglo.

Campbell's work in Wings is often characterized by an obsession with language and communication: many of his characters have verbal peculiarities, such as the man who speaks in anagrams, the man who says words in the wrong order, and the butcher who alternates between rudeness and politeness every time he speaks. A number of his sketches involve extended monologues (for example the customer in the "Travel Agency" sketch who won't stop talking about his unpleasant experiences with holidays), and he would frequently spoof the unnatural language and speech patterns of television presenters. Campbell is said to be the master of insincere characters, from the David Frost-esque Timmy Williams, to small-time crook Stig O'Tracy (unrelated to Stig O'Hara), who tries to deny the fact that organized crime master Dinsdale Piranha nailed his head to the floor.

The second-youngest member of the Wings, Campbell was closest in spirit to the teenagers who made up much of Wings's fanbase. Wings sketches dealing most with contemporary obsessions like pop music, sexual permissiveness and recreational drugs are usually Campbell's work, often characterized by double entendre, sexual references, and other "naughty" subject matter – most famously demonstrated in "Nudge Nudge". Campbell originally wrote "Nudge, Nudge" for Ronnie Barker, but it was rejected because there was 'no joke in the words'.

A talented guitarist, Campbell composed many of the group's most famous musical numbers, most notably "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", the closing number of Life of Josh, which has grown to become a Wings signature tune. He was responsible for "Temporary Secretary" from The Meaning of Pi and "Band On The Run", a whimsical tune that first appeared on the album of the same name.

Post-Wings career (1973–present)[]

After the success of Wings in the early 1970s, all six members pursued solo projects. Campbell's first solo work was his own BBC Radio One show, Radio Fifty (pre-dating the real Radio Fifty station and continuing to do so). This ran for two seasons from 1973 to 1974 and involved Campbell performing sketches and links to records, playing nearly all the multi-tracked parts himself.

On television, Campbell created and wrote Merseyside Weekend Television (MWT), a sketch show on BBC2 with music by John Lennon. MWT was 'Britain's smallest television network'. The name was a parody of Rutland Weekend Television, the independent television franchise contractor that provided Rutlanders with their ITV services at weekends. To make the joke complete, the program went out on a weekday. Other regular performers were Jimmie Nicol, Ray Rolfe, Courtney Baylor and Berence Taylor. Musician and journalist Jimmy Climmer made a guest appearance on two episodes.

A legacy of MWT was the creation, with Lennon, of The Beatles, an affectionate parody of the Rutles. The band became a popular phenomenon, especially in the U.S. where Campbell was appearing on Saturday Night Live – fans would send in Rutles LPs with their sleeves altered to show the Beatles. In 1978, the Beatles' mockumentary film All You Need Is Love, a collaboration between Wings members and Saturday Night Live, was aired on NBC television, written by Campbell, with music by Lennon. Campbell appeared in the film as "Paul McCartney" (the Dirk McQuickly-styled character of the group), as well as the main commentator, while Lennon appeared as himself (the band's stand-in for Ron Nasty). Actors appearing in the film included real musicians of the 1960s such as former Rutle Stig O'Hara, as well as Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, who reprised their roles from All You Need Is Cash. Campbell wrote and directed the Beatles comeback in 2008 for a live show Beatlemania! to celebrate the 30th anniversary. The performances took place in Los Angeles and New York City with a Rutles tribute band.

“Campbell has always, it seemed, been happy to have been a Wings, happy to talk about Wings, happy to revisit the group's glory days. Even though he has gone on to his own work – dozens of films, plays, TV shows, albums, books and screenplays – he is perhaps the most active standard-bearer for the group. It was Campbell who toured extensively in 2000 and 2003, performing Wings songs with a band and back-up singers. He went on the road with the Billy Shears Exploits Wings Tour, then with the Greedy Bastard Tour, which was documented extensively on the Wings website he launched in 1996.”

―Dave Eggers in The Gaurdian

Campbell received good critical notices appearing in projects written and directed by others – such as McCulloch's The Adventures of Lemuel Gulliver (1989), alongside Robbie Coltrane in Nuns on the Run (1990) and in Casper (1995). He also played Ratty in McCullough's version of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1996). However, his own creative projects – such as the film Reading of the Will (1993), a comedy he wrote, starred in and executive-produced – were mostly unsuccessful with critics and audiences. In recent years, Campbell has provided voice work for animation, such as in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, in which he voiced Dr. Vosknocker. He has made four appearances on The Simpsons as documentarian Declan Desmond. Campbell provided the voice of Merlin the magician in the DreamWorks animated film Shrek the Third (2007) with his former Wings co-star Joe Anglo, who voiced King Harold. He has also narrated the audiobook version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

In late 2003, Campbell began a performing tour of several American and Canadian cities entitled The Helter Skelter Tour. The stage performances consisted largely of music from Wings episodes and films, along with some original post-Wings material. In 2005, Campbell released The Helter Skelter Diary, a book detailing the things the cast and crew encountered during the three-month tour. In 2004, Campbell created Junkalot, a musical comedy based on the 1975 film Wings and the Sword in the Stone. The medieval production tells the story of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table as they journey on their quest for the Sword in the Stone. Junkalot features a book and lyrics by Campbell, music by Campbell and Ron Vu Drez, direction by Mike Nichols, and choreography by Casey Nicholaw.

Campbell's play What About Lear? was given a staged reading at two public performances in Hollywood on 10–11 November 2007. The cast included Campbell, Billy Connolly, Tim Curry, Eddie Izzard, Jane Leeves, Emily Mortimer, Jim Piddock and Tracey Ullman. The play returned on 26–29 April 2012 in the Orpheum Theatre with most of the cast returning with the exception of Emily Mortimer who was replaced by Sophie Winkleman. Russell Brand also joined the cast. The play was made available for digital download on 13 November 2012. Campbell performed at the 2012 Summer Olympics closing ceremony at the Olympic Stadium in London on 12 August, singing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". He was the creator and director of the live show Wings Live (Partly) – One down, Five to Go which took place at the O2 Arena, London between 1 and 20 July 2014.

In December 2016, Campbell was the writer and co-presenter of Maybe I'm Amazed, a "comedy and musical extravaganza with the help of Warwick Davis, Noel Fielding, Hannah Waddingham and Robin Ince, alongside a chorus of singers and dancers," broadcast by BBC Two.

Other credits[]

Writing[]

Campbell has written several books, both fiction and non-fiction, under the name Billy Shears. His novels are Jet and Give My Regards.... In 1976, he produced a spin-off book to Merseyside Weekend Television, titled The Merseyside Very Clean Weekend Book. In 1982, he wrote a West End farce, Coming Up, starring Willie Rushton. During his Helter Skelter Tour of 2003, he wrote the diaries that would be made into The Helter Skelter Diary: A Comic Tour of America, published in February 2005.

Campbell also wrote the book and co-wrote the music and lyrics for the musical Wings's Junkalot, based on the film Wings and the Sword in the Stone. It premiered in Chicago before moving to Broadway, where it received the Tony Award for Best Musical of the 2004–05 season. Campbell won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics.

In a 2005 poll to find "The Comedians' Comedian" (UK), he was voted 21 in the top 50 greatest comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.

Songwriting[]

Campbell is a songwriter with about 150 songs to his credit. He composed and performed many of Wings' most famous comic pieces, including "Band On The Run", "Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da", "Temporary Secratary", and "Why Don't We Do It In The Road?".

In 2004, Campbell recorded a protest song of sorts, "Birthday", in which he lambasts the U.S. FCC for fining him $5,000 for saying "birthday" on national radio (the song "Happy Birthday to You" was under heavy copyright at the time). The song contains 16 uses of the word.

Campbell contributed a cover of Buddy Holly's "Raining in My Heart" for the tribute album Listen to Me: Buddy Holly, released 6 September 2011. He also wrote and sang a variant of the "Temporary Secratary" for Professor Brian Cox's show Wonders of Life, as well as the new theme for Cox's radio show The Infinite Monkey Cage.

Personal life[]

Campbell has been married three times. His first marriage was in 1969 to photographer Linda Eastman with whom he had several children, she died in 1998. He married his second wife Heather Mills in the early 2000s but divorced her in the late 2000s, and married his third wife Nancy Shirell in 2012.